Forty Faces That Aren't Alive: Gisèle Vienne's 40 Portraits
The faces in Gisèle Vienne's 40 Portraits (2003–2008) are not alive, and the photographs never pretend otherwise. They are portraits of dolls the artist has made by hand since 2003, shot with the gravity normally given to human sitters. The result is forty images that sit uneasily between tenderness and dread.
Each portrait is spare. A doll's head fills the frame against a neutral, off-white ground, with nothing to soften the encounter. The surfaces are the first thing you notice: porcelain-pale skin, glassy eyes, mouths held shut. Then the details start to separate the faces from one another. Platinum blonde synthetic hair is swept into a side fringe that half hides the face. A black bob is cut precisely, blunt at the brow. A brunette head tilts its gaze downward. Another figure is photographed in profile. In one frame a pale turquoise cotton cap carries an embroidered cartoon character with a magenta bow on a yellow disc, a childish, cheerful object placed on a face that is anything but.
That contrast does much of the work. The props and styling belong to adolescence, while the expressions belong to nowhere. Hair falls over the eyes like a teenager hiding from a camera, yet nobody is hiding, because nobody is there.
The series is organised around whiteness, and Vienne does not let it read as innocence. The color of anguish grabs us by the throat. Pallor here is the color of something endured. Some faces are marked with blood, some with the tracks of tears, some with heavy make-up that looks more like armour than decoration. Each of the forty carries its own particular damage, so the series reads less like a catalogue of types than like a crowd of individuals, each injured in a different way.
The dolls occupy an uncomfortable threshold. They begin as melancholic young girls staged in the pose of a cultural fantasy, drift into androgyny, and finally become something closer to simulacra of death. The sequence is not a story, but it suggests a slow loss of the markers that make a person look like a person, until what is left is a surface.
This in-between state is the heart of Vienne's wider work, which keeps returning to teenagers in rupture: impenetrable and yet unprotected. A doll can hold that condition without ever resolving it. It cannot grow up, and it cannot be rescued.
The most unsettling feature of 40 Portraits is how it positions you. These are beautiful, carefully lit images of faces that invite a long look, and the longer you look, the more you notice what you are doing. The voyeurism the series provokes becomes a trap. Because there is no living model to pity or protect, the fantasy being projected can only be your own. What can these dolls tell us about ourselves, and what tales of defilement, injury, indifference and desire do we read into them?
Vienne turns the viewer's gaze back on itself. The portraits ask us to confront the forms of domination that surround us so comfortably that we rarely notice them.
The dolls did not begin as photographic subjects. Vienne, a choreographer and director as well as a photographer, started making them for her theatre works, many created with the writer Dennis Cooper, where they function as presences rather than props. In 40 Portraits they leave the stage and pose alone, stripped of movement, voice and plot. Without a narrative to explain them, they become more direct: faces that do nothing except stare back.
The series works because it refuses easy answers. The dolls are not victims to be consoled, not monsters to be feared, and not objects to be admired from a safe distance. They are forty handmade faces, each slightly different, that make suffering, shame and domination visible while remaining strangely, stubbornly beautiful. They cannot answer the questions they raise, and that is exactly why the questions stay with you.
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